It's funny how as teenagers we dream about our ideal future and as young adults, we tend to plan our lives, marriages, children, careers, but these dreams and plans turn up to have little to do with reality. But can you really plan these things? When all your friends are dating guys their own age can you expect to fall in love with a much older man? Can you dream about being someone's stepmother? Do you picture yourself as a second or third wife? Do you take into account that fairy tales happen usually only in fairy tales and the prince is just a regular guy with a lot of kingdom-related problems and a wandering eye for ladies of the court? What if you (realistically assessing your personal life) decided on single motherhood, but life got in a way? And if you aren't happy with the result, can you really plan a way out? Maggie's Plan.
In no relationship, you have the naive guarantee that it will last forever. You may wish that one-time fascination will lead to long-lasting happiness, but it is rarely so, taking into account the rate of divorces. You might swallow the bitter pill of realization that your devotion to your husband doesn't make sense and your efforts to make him satisfied are simply futile. He's the one who cheats on you, you know it, you feel less attractive and not desired at all. Will finding an attractive young woman and hatching a plan of his seduction save your marriage, be its biggest downfall, or wake up the long-forgotten eroticism? Or maybe you will fall into your own carefully planned trap? Chloe.
You know these suburban areas. Seemingly, they are a perfect place for cultivating family values, relaxing after a hard day at work in the city. There's a spot for a barbecue with friends, safe children games, there's a driveway for your car and a lawn to mow. It's a great place to make friends, to enjoy the space of your mortgaged house, to lead a happy and peaceful life among trees, bushes, and white fences. Unless you watched Desperate Housewives and the curtains of naivety were raised from your eyes soon enough. Who'd have thought that the suburbs could be the base for a failed murder plot, which twists and turns in a hilarious way? Real America with real people and real memories of racial segregation in the background. Highly entertaining, Suburbicon.
It requires a lot of strength to take a step forward. It requires courage to use personal experiences to drag the rest towards a more just, more equal world. Sometimes the greatest tragedy is a precedence that can help others win what is truly theirs from the beginning. Sometimes people need the precedence to make them admit that they were wrong, that there is something faulty in their perception of the world. This is a story of a loving couple who wished for the same rights as everybody else. And a story about real people who learned to accept, support and respect not a theoretical concept, but real human beings, their friends, workmates, and colleagues. Let's wish everybody the same learning process. Freeheld.
Oh, we do seem to have a problem with procreation. There are now questions if you really want to have children at all, taking into account the cost of upbringing, potential risks, and dangers of having a child and the fact that the whole process of raising a human is not really a piece of cake. At the same time, those who have the capacity of being a parent often struggle to have biological children due to infertility, the lack of the right partner, being in a same-sex relationship with no possibility of surrogates or adoption. Rich pay the poor to have children. Poor have many, yet they are not able to support them. Sixty-year-old mothers hit newspapers headlines, reminding us that it is never too late to become a parent. But if it was too late and the mankind faced the infuriating problem of global infertility? What if the last born child meant the upcoming end of the world? Children of Men.
Every winter a flu epidemic hits the unsuspecting citizens, causing long queues at the doctors and a diminished attendance at schools and kindergartens. Occasionally Zika virus terrifies future mothers afraid of giving birth to children with deformed heads. From time to time there is an outbreak of a disease to which there's no cure and the possibility of spreading it over a bigger area is the greatest fear of the government of each and every country. There are still diseases to which we have no treatment, epidemics which wiped out millions from the surface of the Earth. Medical progress might be visible but we are still far from feeling completely secure. Scenarios of tragedies cross our minds from time to time. And what if one day you all of a sudden lost one of your most important senses? Blindness. An adaptation of a novel by José de Sousa Saramago. And a terrifyingly probable scenario.
Don't you love it when the film takes you to a completely different place on earth when you can forget about your past problems and current worries, about the home you are living in, about the people who hurt you? Wouldn't you like to begin again? Don't you love the cathartic experience of someone's else pain, loss and the realization that there can be a happy ending? Maybe not the same, maybe slightly different from what you had expected. The Shipping News is such a story. Maybe you also need a fresh start or a change of place. Possibly your love life needs a few tinkering works. This is a film for you.
